Android users: You have Venetia Espinoza, MBA ’91, to thank for your Angry Birds addiction. Espinoza is director of digital stores and mobile payments for T-Mobile. She reflects on the potential merger with AT&T and 15 years of making smart phones smarter.

FierceWireless recognized Espinoza as one of 10 top women in wireless in 2009 and Mobile Entertainment cited her as one of the top 50 women in mobile content in 2009 and top 50 U.S. executives in 2008.

Why did you pursue your MBA?

I have an engineering undergrad and worked for Texas Instruments as an industrial engineer. I loved the textbook study of engineering, but being in manufacturing plants, doing time-motion studies, recreating production lines—while it was really fascinating textbook-wise, it was not for me in a practical “go to work every day” scenario.

When I researched the potential that you have with an MBA, it just seemed like there were a lot more job choices. I’m a people person. Business development, negotiations and communications all play to what I felt were strengths and areas of opportunity if I proceeded to get an MBA.

How would you characterize your MBA experience?

It was like opening a new world. As an engineering undergrad, I didn’t have a lot of time for elective classes. I felt like a sponge, literally. Absorbing everything that was taught in the graduate program, and also the knowledge of my peer group. One of the things that attracted me to the McCombs graduate program was the camaraderie among the students.

What’s one of your most memorable McCombs experiences?

I took an organizational behavior class that was based on how managers really deal with a lot of their own personal attributes and how that affects what you do in your professional life.

Once you’re in the workforce and you get married, have children, life becomes a balance of who you are as an individual. How you’re effective as an executive or a professional really depends on how you’re able to cope with all of those competing priorities in your life, and also just how grounded you are as an individual. It isn’t just about knowing how to run numbers and do a business case and put a marketing plan together, but it’s really about the whole person.

Have you always worked in telecommunications?

After [eight years with] Nextel, I took what I like to call a “self-proclaimed sabbatical” for a year. I left just before the merger with Sprint. I’d always wanted to try consulting and went to work for Hitachi Consulting in their telecommunications sector.

Less than a year later, a recruiter came knocking on my door from T-Mobile offering me a job to get back into wireless, and accepted that opportunity and have been at T-Mobile for a little over four years.

Why did you make that move?

Hitachi hired me because of my experience in wireless and the telecom field. I got put on a project with a large insurance provider. I learned more about the insurance industry than I ever cared to. This provider got named as one of the big accounts, and I kept going into that and winning more business—being asked by name to come back. I felt like it would be difficult to extract myself from that project.

It would’ve been fine if I had just been this focused on wireless. You know, wireless is my true love. I’ve been in the wireless industry for 15 plus years. This industry never stops changing, never stops growing. It’s just as exciting to me today as the first day I entered at GTE.

What is one of the toughest lessons you’ve had to learn?

As a working mom, sometimes you have to say no to opportunities because they just don’t fit with the goals and the things that are important to you in your personal life. The tradeoff can be very difficult.

What is the most challenging aspect of your job?

I am responsible for revenue targets for the year, and sometimes I have to make tradeoffs between one business or the other. Sometimes the decisions I’m making will help one side of my business but cannibalize the other side. There always has to be a strong balance between generating revenue and what’s the right strategic thing to do.

How has your job changed in recent years?

We used to think of our phones as just a means to talk. That has completely shifted to where we think of our phones now as small computing devices. For folks in their early 20s, the fact that it’s a phone is almost secondary. That has led to a lot of interest by players outside of the traditional telecom sector. You have big players like Google, whose strategy now revolves around mobile, as well.

I’ve been in the content business, and we’ve experienced significant growth in the last ten years. I don’t see that slowing down.  First we sold a ton of ringtones and things that you personalize your phone with. Now, that has moved toward utility—from a consumer perspective, “apps.” It’s about what applications can I run that make my life easier, better, faster, more enjoyable, etc.

What do you think about T-Mobile’s potential merger with AT&T?

I’m one of those people that believes change always brings opportunity. And I think this is good for T-Mobile, and I am one of those people that also believes that it’s good for the industry and good for the consumer. I’ve never been in a situation professionally where change didn’t bring opportunity of positive things for me, so I’m very optimistic about it.

Recently the merger has become less certain. How do you make effective business decisions in that climate?

The difficult part is managing people. In this climate of uncertainty, they take other opportunities. It’s tough to keep and hire. It takes a strong people manager who’s focused on communication. I try to be very candid and honest, to keep the lines of communication open.

I try to do that, anyway. I talk with my senior managers about their career plans, what they want to do. A good boss sees the personal side of each individual and, ideally, can ally their personal goals with corporate objectives. In many ways, it’s the same skill set you needs for sales, looking at it from their perspective, the “What’s in it for me?”

Tell me about your nonprofit work.

I was one of the founders of an organization called Palindrome Advisors, which finds nonprofit organizations with specific needs and matches them to corporate executives with specific skill-sets. There’s a lot of knowledge and expertise that various nonprofit organizations need. It’s just playing that matchmaker. That’s the role that Palindrome is trying to fill.

[Community service] doesn’t always have to be building a house or serving soup in a soup line. Find a skill-set that you have and translate that into helping a nonprofit organization or your community.